Upper Necaxa Totonac
| Upper Necaxa Totonac | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Mexico |
| Region | Puebla |
| Ethnicity | 5,800 live in houses headed by speakers (2000) |
|
Native speakers
|
3,400 (2000) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | uppe1275 |
Upper Necaxa Totonac is a native American language of central Mexico spoken by 3,400 people in and around four villages— Chicontla, Patla, Cacahuatlán, and San Pedro Tlaloantongo —in the Necaxa River Valley in Northern Puebla State. Although speakers represent the majority of the adult population in Patla and Cacahuatlán, there are very few monolinguals and few if any children are currently learning the language as a mother tongue, and, as a consequence, the language must be considered severely endangered.
In some respects, Upper Necaxa has a fairly typical Totonacan consonantal inventory, lacking a voice/voiceless opposition in stops and having the three lateral phonemes /l/, /ɬ/, and /tɬ/, although the lateral affricate /tɬ/ has largely been replaced by the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/, persisting in word-final position in only a few lexical items.
The Upper Necaxan inventory is also notable in the family in that it lacks a uvular stop /q/ but contains a robust glottal stop phoneme, derived historically from *q. The loss of *q also resulted in the collapse of fricative + uvular sequences—*sq, *ʃq, and *ɬq—to ejective fricatives at the same point of articulation (i.e., s’, ʃ’, and ɬ’).
The vowel inventory is also somewhat different from most other members of the family, having full phonemic mid-vowels.
Although most examples of /e/ and /o/ are conditioned, at least diachronically, by adjacency to /ʔ/ (historically, *q) and, to a lesser extent, to /y/ and /x/, there are nevertheless enough instances of both without the conditioning environment that the vowels have to be considered phonemic.
Like other Totonacan languages, Upper Necaxa is a highly polysynthetic agglutinating language, making extensive use of both prefixes and suffixes for inflection, quasi-inflection, and derivation. The verb has nine relatively ordered prefixal “slots” and fourteen positions for suffixes. These positions are determined simply by the relative order in which co-occurring affixes can appear on the verb and do not correlate with semantically or functionally defined categories. Several affixes can appear in more than one position in the template, depending on various formal, semantic, and stylistic factors, and one position, suffix position 2, can accommodate more than one affix, the suffixes that can occupy this position being variably ordered with respect to one another.
...
Wikipedia